Thursday, June 28, 2012

Load-Testing ASP.NET MVC (Part 2 - JMeter introduction)



Although Apache Workbench provides some simple and useful metrics it's a little bit limited. In this post I'm going to talk about a much more powerful tool for load-testing: JMeter (also from the Apache Foundation).

I'll start by replicating the previous experiment that I did with Apache Worbench but using JMeter, and gradually adding more complexity to it.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Load-Testing ASP.NET MVC (Part 1 - Apache Workbench)




Performance is a critical aspect of most applications. Everything may be pretty, really well developed, intuitive and all, but if the performance is not up to par the user experience is going to suck.


Unfortunately most of these performance problems only show themselves after some time in production, making them much more cumbersome to solve and handle.

In this post I'm going to talk about something that should, IMHO, be integrated in the development lifecycle before the application goes live: Load-tests.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Custom Map Tiles (Part 4 - Programmatically with EF 5)


Hi,

After a pause from mapping related stuff, I couldn't resist going back for some more, especially having just downloaded Visual Studio 2012 RC1.

In this post I'm going to show how to create tiles programatically at server-side using .NET 4.5 and Entity Framework 5 RC 1.

I'll basically create an ASP.NET MVC 4.0 application which handles http tile requests, uses Entity Framework to fetch spatial data from a SQL Server database and produces a bitmap image using GDI+. Then I'll show these tiles on a Leaflet Map. This seems too much trouble for what is worth but sometimes you just need the extra control to do stuff that otherwise would be really difficult to do.

As usual I'm going to show most of the steps to get this thing working, just jumping some hoops on simpler stuff. Anyway, even if some steps seem less clear I'm including a zip file with the whole solution.


Saturday, June 2, 2012

Create 3D objects inside Cocos2D-x (Part 2 - Menus)

Part 1 - Introduction
Part 2 - Menus

In my previous post I've created a very rough experiment showing some 3D boxes on top of the default Cocos2d-X template.

In this post I'm going to create something a little bit more useful: a level selection mechanism in 3D. This demo uses some additional concepts like:
  • Texturing
  • Changing the POV (Point-of-view) based on the device accelerometer
  • Click-detection
When launching the application we have the following screen: